Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project software (MSP) is a powerful project planning tool often used for initial project planning or status reporting. Those companies that use Microsoft Project typically also use an interactive task management system like Atlassian JIRA, Redmine, Trello and such.
The challenge with a static Microsoft Project plan file is that once it is created, it is too tedious to keep up-to-date. Many managers use Microsoft Project in the beginning of a project to roughly estimate required resources and completion date, but when the project actually starts, the plan quickly becomes out of date and useless.
Original motivation for TaskAdapter software
This actually was the original motivation for TaskAdapter project: the author was working as a technical project manager at a Silicon Valley IT company and he needed to provide an estimate about the current project completion date.
While a popular “divide and conquer” principle works for basic estimates, once your project gets into hundreds of moving parts with dozens of developers and multiple dependencies between what part of the project is blocking what other part, it is nearly impossible to collect that information from your task management system.
After a sizeable estimation process for all important tasks and dependencies between them, a Visual Basic script
was created to export tasks from the task management system (Redmine at the time) to a Microsoft Project file.
This allowed to get a ballpark estimate given all the tasks laying on the critical path of the project.
Read TaskAdapter history page if you are curious about the rest of the story.
Having a Microsoft Project plan that is always up-to-date
So… What if you could always have up-to-date information about your project in Microsoft Project format?
Here are the most common scenarios for integrating a Microsoft Project plan with a task management system and others:
Use Task Adapter to load the current “Snapshot” of your project from your bug tracking / task management system like Atlassian JIRA, Github website, MantisBT Redmine, etc - and save into a Microsoft Project file. You can even update the created file using Microsoft Project and re-export data back to your bug tracker. New tasks will be created and the old ones will be updated.
Read details on how to configure Task Adapter to integrate Microsoft Project into your work process.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to integrate Microsoft Project and Atlassian JIRA.